What? It's late/early and I'm not the smartest so I'm unclear on what you're trying to say.
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An issue I can have with my fellow Liberals is a lack of good self reflection. Too often they can get sucked up into "Their side is worse" to really analyze what's wrong here.
They often rationalize it with "be pragmatic" which as a fellow pragmatic isn't always the best way. Constant pragmatic thought can lead to stagnation and demoralization.
Ah okay, I follow you. Sorry about that.
One of the problems I have with some liberals is they never seem to have a real goal beyond pragmatism. "Being better than conservatives but not enough to piss off conservatives." It inevitably doesn't work out well for anyone, you'll never please conservatives and the half or even quarter measure solution to X problem never really fixes anything.
Also defining yourself by what conservatives think is acceptable means it's another way you can constantly get dragged right. Third wayism doesn't seem to stand for anything other than being marginally better than conservatives and putting a smiley face on shitty social policies.
The thing that really gets me annoyed, is that third wayism is dying around the world BUT they somehow think this is still the 90s and Blair/Clinton figures still rule the world. Defeat is brushed off or its because you weren't right wing enough. That isn't pragmatism but it's presented as such.
Sorry, I got into a rant there.
P.S When I say liberals, I'm not talking about you or every liberal, so don't think I'm attacking you or anything.
You're not, but make no mistake I am still a capitalist! Just one who knows we're really of the rails right now and need to take a big stick and go to town on corps and the rich.
Make no mistake, "let not perfect be the enemy of good". I get what Obama is talking about; my prior issues with certain leftists trying to make Warren out to be Reagan's clone would be the targets. Or White folk who take racial injustice to far left and start actively hating the fact they are white. Like chill my dudes.
This also doesn't mean the left doesn't have blind spots of it's own. Racial issues and economic issues are not the same. Just giving racist poor people money won't make them magically not racist.
We could all learn from one another.
Except Sphagnum and his damn corn!
Make no mistake, "let not perfect be the enemy of good". I get what Obama is talking about; my prior issues with certain leftists trying to make Warren out to be Reagan's clone would be the targets. Or White folk who take racial injustice to far left and start actively hating the fact they are white. Like chill my dudes.
This also doesn't mean the left doesn't have blind spots of it's own. Racial issues and economic issues are not the same. Just giving racist poor people money won't make them magically not racist.
We could all learn from one another.
Except Sphagnum and his damn corn!
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360.000 people in mexico live in anarchist communities today. Also rojava is also anarchy-communist with 2.000.000 people. Any system models have problem even social democracy has a list o problems, but it will stop importuning you.
Rojava is a war zone where centralized government control collapsed, it is very different than a place like MAREZ, even if some of ad hoc the mechanisms that were put in place to try to run it are not dissimilar.
I would also urge everyone to not take at face value every piece of reporting that they see about people who are fighting for US's interests.
p.s.
You should consider visiting the Zapatistas in MAREZ though, it's safe and they love visitors.
Both of those are small, geographically and population.
The U.S. can never be anarchist. Or the whole world.
So the problem is that the US is too big and populated, you think?
Too big, too spread out and to interconnected.
Fire, Healthcare, Police, Education and infrastructure of this scale does not work without a state apparatus.
I'm not entirely sure the Rojavan government model isn't scaleable. Basically, it's a federalist system that just views the municipality as the central unit and works up from there rather than from a top-down formation, united by a universally-accepted charter. You still have regional elections and the such. Rojava effectively posits that anarchism isn't incompatible with federalism and I tend to agree.
The police over in Catalonia worked just fine without a central authority-- as did education.
I don't necessarily disagree with your premise that America's geographical atomization is a major impediment to any revolutionary project, however. And I mean that in terms of radical change within the established system as well! In fact, to a certain extent, that's the problem-- the system isn't really designed to allow for widespread change, and widespread change is something we need to establish with a quickness. "We're too spread out and too interconnected" is a problem statement, in my view, not a refutation.
They actually are inseparable issues and there's clear historical evidence to support that. I don't think giving poor people money will stop them from being racist but what's important is building coalitions based on class so that wealth inequality can truly be addressed. Republicans have demonized minorities and the state for a long time, it will take extensive education to fix that.
If this were the case, racism wouldn't be as prevelant among the rich.
you can't stop shitty people from being racists, but what you can do is minimize the systemic damage racists can do. it'd be a lot easier for minorities to deal with racist assholes if those assholes didn't have domineering power over their livelihood as they so often do in a capitalist state.
The end result of that racism is that it prevents white and minorities from working together, that is what it's used for.
Things the Republican party does to break up black communities, prevent them from voting, and to also demonize the government:
The war on drugs, the southern strategy, gerrymandering, election abuses these things have all been used on black people to destroy their communities and to hurt their voting bloc. They've also demonized the government with all of the red scare propaganda, regime changes in Central America, McCarthyism, they tell white people that the only good that government does is help minorities and so it appeals to them to vote Republican. If Republicans get into office they get to keep more of their money.
That doesn't even get into the harm that things like money lenders, payday loans, blockbusting all economically motivated that disproportionately hurt minority communities.
This I agree with.
The issue I have is arguing against identity politics as if this is some made up thing by the GOP or the establishment. People identity with specific things!
Nazism became popular in part because Germany was suffering economically after WWI and then that only intensified once the Great Depression hit and Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats, Hitler used the economic struggle of German people against the Jews and made them the enemy. Hitler actually lost the election against Hindenberg (?), he won something like 33% of the vote but capital owners convinced Hindenberg to appoint Hitler to a leadership role precisely because they were worried about the growing popularity of socialism and they thought they could reign in his antisemitism, we know how that turned out.
However, that was less Hitler generating racism so much as it was Hitler harnessing racism. Anti-semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries was out of fucking control. I mean, it always was, but it was on an upswing even before WW1. I mean, shit, look at Bakunin. Dude was fucking ready to go do some immensely regrettable shit, not just write immensely regrettable shit.
Aren't most of these primed for decentralization? I mean the firedepartment in Sacramento really does not need to work in tandem or closely follow what the fire department in Tampa does...
I think you're both right, he harnessed it when successfully blaming jews for the German loss in WW1 and the crippling of the German economy, that doesn't happen without a substantial amount of anti Semitism existing already. But he definitely generated it too, the random person on the street may of been anti Semitic before but they weren't members of the nazi party, raiding Jewish homes/shops etc and cheering putting Jews and other groups in trains to hell.
I've just been made aware of a Harvard study showing the success rates of peaceful protests dropped from 70% to 30% in the mid 2000s, which they believe is thanks to police micro targeting organizers.
Shows how dangerous the surveillance state is. Organizers either need to learn how to protect thier privacy, or become visible enough that their arrest would flair up further protest, alongside a passing of the baton to someone not known by police.
Shows how dangerous the surveillance state is. Organizers either need to learn how to protect thier privacy, or become visible enough that their arrest would flair up further protest, alongside a passing of the baton to someone not known by police.
By micro targeting do they mean police infiltration of groups? If so there was a big thing over here about that.
Probably means pointing out and detaining specific individuals via advanced communication and research as well. Black bloc tactics help, folks! Or the HK evolution to such is valid too.
That too, but harassment of organizers and infiltration of groups has been a thing for decades. It's the extra knowledge that comes from heavy surveillance that makes it so successful.
HK being decentralized is really throwing the cops for a loop.
I see, thanks!
I think Hong Kong's protestors have provided a blueprint for groups going forward. If they can sustain this in one of the most highly monitored societies on earth everyone else can too.
Behind the Bastards very lightly touched upon Hong Kong and their tactics and how the Catalans adopted some of them.
Link?
I'm asking because the police, NSA and FBI have been specifically targeting organizers since forever.
They have more capabilities these days, but most organizers and protest leaders are pretty damn easy to find.
Today Explained podcast on worldwide protests is where I learned it. I'm sure the study itself could be googled.
I couldn't find it. But I didn't look terribly hard.
Anyway, I'm not sure I'm buying it, what's the last big protest movement in the US that died because their leaders were arrested?
I listened to that Today Explained episode, and honestly, from the way the study was described I think it's more about a change in goals than improved police action. Governments have become better at waiting out or disrupting protestor, but a big thing that was mentioned was that protestors are asking for a lot more - not the removal of a corrupt leader and some reforms, but a wholesale changing of the system, often in ways that're beyond the ability of any one government to do. Climate protests are the obvious example here. There's no way to protest hard enough in, say, Norway that China changes their emission standards.
In that blog about the study, government data was the first thing the researcher mentioned.
Making larger demands was talked about in today explained too, but it's not at all like Norway protesting China. It's things thier local governments can do but won't because it's too uncomfortable for them.
I'll have to sit down and go through it, then.
I meant more that like... If you're in Norway, and you stage a climate protest, the goal of which is something like "meet global emission standards reductions we need to avoid the 2 C threshold", then there's only so much the government of Norway can *do*. At some point that protest gets marked as being unsuccessful. So if the proportion of protests that fall into that general category has increased, then the proportion of successful protests would of course go down.
But I haven't had time to go through the article, so maybe that's not as much of a factor as I'm thinking.
Protesters are smart enough to know they aren't going to impact another country's policy by going to their local streets and I don't know where you got the idea that there's been any protest like that.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if privileged people who think protesting is just a form of advertising would think to do that, but they don't do many protests anyway.
The Chile protests are only in part climate protests because the reason their cost of living is going up and quality of life is going down is because the ruling class puts all of the burden of climate change on the working class.
Cool, thanks!
It will be interesting to see the data set they worked with.
Also at least from the interview, they seem to be guessing this is what caused it more than anything, but it's hard to tell from an interview like that (it's also hard to know such things with anything that comes close certainty).
Either way, this is super interesting.
It's pretty useless unless you can get them to realize you subscribe to a belief system they haven't actually encountered previously. THAT opens up some ears, some of the time anyways.
Libertarian municipalism is a good opener for that.
It's not useless for the far right. It's just really important to understand the audience isn't the person you're arguing with, it's the normies watching from the sidelines.
The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie
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Yeah, it's sometimes hard to judge if some of the questions are genuine or just trolling. Stuff like "Why would humans do x without money/status?" could be an honest question but it also could just be someone wasting your time.
This is true and I've watched the video before (that entire series is excellent) but I simply don't have the temperament to talk to a random far right guy. I've tried, but my patience isn't the best.It's not useless for the far right. It's just really important to understand the audience isn't the person you're arguing with, it's the normies watching from the sidelines.
The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie
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If I saw one of my real life friends going down that rabbit hole I could do something, but again it's hard for me to judge online who is genuine and who is not, unless I have some sort of history with them.